Major ISPs unite in spam fight

TalkBack 13 of 16:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

There is a big difference

Some people argue there is no difference between spam and television commercials. There is a big difference between television commercials and spam. In exchange for television commercials you receive programming at no charge. If it wasn?t for television commercials all programming would be either pay per view or you would subscribe to each station or group of stations.

Companies using the postal service pay to deliver their advertisements to your postal mailbox. This provides operating revenue for the postal service. If it wasn?t for bulk mail you likely would have to pay more to send a letter or package.

Email spam contributes nothing to society. For the cost of a cheap dialup account anyone can open up their own business. Most of the spam sent is fraudulent in one way or another. Either it?s an outright attempt to scam you out of your hard earned money or the headers are forged. Additionally most spammers steal resources to send out their spew. They cost others money to deliver their message. Granted, most of the theft of services involves un-secure mail servers or open proxies. While the owner of those mail servers should be considered responsible they?re not directly at fault. If your car keys are left in the car and someone steals it who is the criminal? You for forgetting or the person actually committing a crime?

Spam costs business big money. Employees spend time every day cleaning out their mailbox. This is time stolen by the spammers. Time that could have otherwise been productive is spent trying to reduce the contents of the inbox to business related matters.

At first glance it may seem like a good idea to occasionally change your email address. A personal address isn?t that difficult to change. You simply notify your friends of the new address. An email address used by business isn?t so easily changed. Rather than having to notify a dozen or so people you?re now looking at sometimes 100?s of notifications. Then you must rely on the other party to update their records. If they fail to do so next time they attempt to contact you they?ll get a bounced message. Some may attempt to contact you through other means, some will find another vendor.

Sorting out spam has become a difficult task. I did purchase software that did effectively filter spam at first. Over time it has become less effective. When the filtering software was first installed it was missing 5-10 spams per day. It is now missing 30-40 per day. Many spammers test filtering software and test new ways to get past filtering. Even though you?ve made a decision not to read their messages they work toward getting in your face again.

Reduced efficiency in filtering isn?t the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the time needed to review the messages that were filtered. I receive between 500 and 900 spams per day, weekends are the worst. Several years ago I could not bother with email on weekends. If I do that today I?m faced with a mountain of spam Monday morning. I must review what got filtered, if I don?t it could mean lost revenue. A single message lost could mean hundreds of dollars lost.

Nearly all spammers will not honor unsubscribe requests. Instead you?re simply confirming the email address exists. Worse they do not use valid headers so bounced messages numbering into the thousands sit queued on my mail server . I?ve actually setup some trap addresses to determine if the spammers take a domain and just add first names to attempt delivery. They indeed do that. One address I installed received over 100MB of spam in less than a month. The address was never published, never used for any purpose. It was simply installed on the mail server.

What amazes me most is the content of what I?m receiving. A large portion of the spam is advertisement for controlled drugs. Why isn?t the FDA actively going after these people? Additionally the amount of porn sent out in messages. No question they?re sending the same content to minors. Why aren?t the states using existing laws to go after these people? It is a crime to distribute pornography to minors.

Bottom line, spam is intrusive and costly. The costs are real dollars in stolen bandwidth, stolen resources and stolen time. Spammers aren?t simply annoying they?re criminals, thieves, liars and wannabe con artists.

Posted by: mfinkle   Posted on: 03/19/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Dell on OpenManage Dell Dell Computer Corporation runs its business on thousands of Dell PowerEdge ... Download Now
• Tom Davenport Study: Linking decisions and information for organizational performance IBM Tom Davenport's new client study looks at approaches to linking ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now